


It's Only Prison If You Want Out

by theunknownfate



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Karnak ends differently, Other, Rorschach lives, a Halloween AU, break from canon, but - Freeform, so does something much worse than the squid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:29:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5111330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theunknownfate/pseuds/theunknownfate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old Halloween fill from kinkmeme 3. It's set during the time Rorschach is in jail and he gets a cellmate who might be more dangerous than him. What happens there changes quite a few things. The prompt was for spooky Watchmen horror and this is what I came up with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rumor

The guards didn’t bother to keep their voices down. 

“So they’re shipping this bastard to us because they don’t have _room_? Wasn’t it explained that we’re up to our tonsils in scumbags already?”

“Apparently this one’s special. All his cellmates end up dead. Suicides mostly, but a few unexplained. Nothing that led back to him, but they put him in solitary and the whole fucking floor died in their sleep!”

“Except for him?”

“Except for him. And get this! They brought in a Geiger counter to see if he was radioactive.”

“…was he?”

“No! Jeez. Of course not. He’s just got himself a reputation. Scares people into doing something stupid and then reaps the benefit.”

“Well, what killed the whole solitary block then?”

“I dunno. Gas leak? Point is they want to stash him somewhere while they clean up the mess, and who’s got the toughest prison population on the East Coast? Oh yeah, and who do we have who isn’t afraid of anything?”

“They aren’t thinking of putting him in with-”

“Uh-huh!” There was more glee in that voice than was really appropriate. They came to a stop outside a cell and one of them leaned casually against it, smirking at the inmate inside. The other kept a more deferential distance. “Hear that, Rorschach? You’re going to make a new friend!”


	2. Observation

“This isn’t a good idea,” said the delivery guard. “We have orders not to let him out of any of his restraints.” 

“Our house, our rules,” snapped the cocky guard. “We drag bigger assholes than this around by their noses.”

“Your funeral.”

The new inmate seemed docile though. He obeyed all the commands given to him without so much as a glare. The catch poles were removed, and the first few layers of chains and restraints were taken off. He was still chained at ankles, wrists, and waist, but it was enough for him to be able to walk on his own. He was lead past the gauntlet of inmates, and seemed oblivious to their taunts and filth. If anything, his mood seemed to lighten. 

“Put the smile away, buttercup, you won’t need it where you’re going,” said a guard with amused sympathy. 

“Jack Doe,” another read from a clipboard. “Real name unknown. Aliases unknown. Age unknown. Person of interest in at least 85 deaths. Former inmate of Holman Correctional Facility. Only survivor of the Fenwick Sanitarium incident.” The guard’s voice became uncertain at that, then went on a little louder. “Former inmate of Angola Penitentiary. You are now the property of Sing Sing Correctional Facility.” 

 

Rorschach heard it all, but didn‘t see his new cellmate for another hour. Processing. When he was led in and unchained, Jack Doe was impressively nondescript, tall enough that he could maybe be threatening if he tried, he was still able to take up very little space. He was dark, but didn’t have any noticeable ethnic features. He could've been 20 or 30 or 40. His head had been shaved and not very carefully when he arrived, probably under the pretense of sanitation when they really just wanted to remind him that anything could be done to him if they wanted

Maybe it had worked. He seemed meek as a lamb. Once unchained, he stepped into the cell without protest and sat on his bunk. That put him directly across from Rorschach. He smiled placidly, like a kid on the first day of camp.

“Terror of the Underworld, meet the Angel of Death. You boys play nice,” the guard said, slamming the door shut. 

The newcomer was calm. It wasn’t even an eerie calm, just a pleasant serenity, completely incongruous in a prison cell. Always alert for an attack, Rorschach was picking up nothing from him. 

“Not John Doe,” he finally said. “Jack.” His cellmate nodded. 

“Not Azrael or Samael.”

“Or Samedi,” Jack said, still smiling. His accent was a hodgepodge, but it wasn’t the stereotypical southern one Rorschach had halfway expected. “One name is enough.”

They sat in silence for a long time after that. The lights were shut down and they sat in the dark.

“Murderer,” Rorschach said. 

“No proof.” It wasn’t a denial. 

“Prisons and asylums without proof? Plenty walk free for that.”

“Know what to say, how to act. Just enough that they keep me. Prison is the best place for someone like me.” Jack met his eyes for the first time, and they were black with no reflections, swallowing up the weak light. They didn’t speak again. Jack lay down and folded his arms behind his head. He didn’t sleep. Rorschach leaned against his wall. He hadn’t intended to sleep the first night, but when the cell began to fill with black water, he knew he was dreaming. It was cool, but not cold, rising quickly and pouring out through the bars. 

The whole prison was filling up. The other inmates were pounding on their bars, but not in a panicked way. It was a synchronized, rhythmic pounding, like the building’s clanging heartbeat, pumping black blood through all the hallways. Rorschach stood on the bunk and the water rose to his waist. There was a current, so it had to be coming from somewhere. Across the cell, Jack stood up too, Only the top half of his face was visible and the blackness was pouring out of the pits of his eyes. 

Rorschach woke up in time to hear the first all-call. He had never slept that late since he had gotten here. Nothing had happened. He was unharmed and Jack didn’t seem to have moved at all. It wasn‘t until he sat up that Rorschach realized that overnight, Jack’s black hair had grown long enough to hang in his eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

The morning head check ground to a halt about five cells down. A lowlife powerhouse, Clifford “The Cliff” Morgan was face down in his toilet, stone dead. Rorschach remembered the name, the big man had survived one of Manhattan’s mobster massacres by being in the bathroom, and been arrested when he was found up to his knees in his former employers’ remains. 

“What the hell happened here?” bellowed a guard. “One of you bastards break poor Cliffy’s heart? Tell him you’d met somebody thinner?” No one answered. The next four cells had inmates in escalating stages of distress. Two were curled in their bunks, sweating and groaning, the one nearest Cliff was delirious with pain. They were sent to the infirmary and Cliff was wheeled out on a gurney. The big man must’ve inhaled huge amounts of water because he left a trail of it, shiny and black on the floor. 

The guards checked the rest of the cells, stopping at Rorschach’s. They looked a little disappointed to see both prisoners unscathed and in nearly identical positions to the ones they’d been left in. Rorschach saw a few double takes at the sight of Jack’s hair, and the guard he had identified as being the most soft, most under the sway of the others, raised a finger to point, but was shushed. 

“You didn’t hear anything about all that?” asked the cocky one, jerking a thumb back toward the now empty cells. “One man dead and four others moaning like they’re dying and they didn’t make a sound?”

“Ask one of the guards,” Rorschach said. “Their job to keep an eye on things.” The violence that that should’ve brought was interrupted by the quiet guard’s question to Jack.

“This happens everywhere you go, doesn’t it?” he said. “I read your file. Do you do it on purpose, or does it just happen?” Jack tilted his head to look at him, same placid smile, same fathomless eyes. He could’ve been any age, in any part of the world, and not looked out of place. “How did you do it? What did you say to Cliff to make him drown himself in a toilet? What did he ever do to you?”

“Shaddup, Stu,” snarled the other one. “Don’t encourage the freak show. You can’t keep secrets in this place. We’ll find out eventually.” He slammed his baton against the bars, clearly wishing it was Rorschach’s nose, and they moved on. 

Breakfast was late when it was decided that the four in the infirmary had acute food poisoning. New food was shipped in and it took two hours. It was a long wait for pop tarts and canned peaches. The tentative theory was that Cliff had been so violently sick that he had passed out with his head still over the toilet, had fallen in and drowned. Rorschach wasn’t allowed in general population, but Jack was turned out into the exercise yard. Rorschach kept watch on what he could see from his cell and Jack obliged him by staying in sight. 

For someone who had been in so many prisons for so long, Jack acted like he had no idea how to stay out of trouble. He was targeted almost at once. He ignored the bullying, and seemed congenially amused at the crude propositions, and made no move to fight back when he was attacked. The guards took their time breaking it up, probably it had been their intention to let him be roughed up a little when they took him out, but it got out of hand quickly and they had no choice. 

Everyone was pulled away, and underneath it all, Jack was being held by the throat by Andrew Vancey , a strangler/rapist that had lost an eye fighting the Comedian in the old days, but hadn’t been caught until eight years later, by the second Silk Spectre, no less. They were also locked in a painful kiss which made a few of the guards laugh until they had to use batons to get Vancey off. He staggered away, red running down his chin, then collapsed to his knees, vomiting blood. 

The laughter died out as the blood became a gush of black and it kept pouring out of him like river water. Finally, he threw his head back and wailed a weird, gargling dry and collapsed in the puddle. Jack stepped forward, his footsteps resounding in the sudden silence. He walked slowly to Vancey, every step sounding like the heartbeat pounding Rorschach remembered in his dream, until he stood over the body. Jack leaned over and spit Vancey’s bitten off tongue back into his gaping mouth.

It hit with a wet slap and Jack stood up to look around the crowd. For a moment, he looked like an animal claiming a kill, but then he raised his hands and allowed himself to be seized and restrained. His hair was to his shoulders now. 

“He’s got poison on him somewhere!” a guard was shouting. “It’s the only way he could’ve pulled that off. Get some gloves on and search him!” They had Jack held down and were checking his mouth for anything like a capsule, He wasn’t fighting them either, and offered no resistance as he was heaved to his feet and his clothing stripped off. Body searches weren’t supposed to be public, but they were taking no chances. 

Jack had some kind of marking over his back and arms. It wasn’t a tattoo, didn’t look like a scar. Maybe a burn? Accustomed to the patterns on his own mask, Rorschach thought he saw it move, just a ripple under the skin, like an alligator under the surface. As soon as that crossed his mind, Jack looked over his shoulder and pinned him with that black glass stare. Despite the situation and the indignity, he had his smile back on.


	4. Chapter 4

Jack was brought back to the cell shortly after. There was some argument over whether or not he should be allowed in with anyone, but it was pointed out that there was a pool in affect as to who would survive if he and Rorschach actually did throw down, so he was shoved in and the door was locked. 

“It’s not going to happen again,” hissed a guard. “You’re trapped. Don’t forget that.”

“Trapped?” Jack chuckled. “You lock the fox up in your henhouse, he ain’t trapped.”

“Laugh while you can. There’s a lobotomy with your name on it waiting in the wings.”

Jack laughed outright at that, the first loud sound he had made. 

“You’ll suffer more than I will,” he said, and then they were left alone again. Jack was still disheveled from the fight and the search and his hair hid his eyes now. He settled down a moment or two later, folding his hands in his lap. Rorschach broke the silence first. 

“Not poison,” he said finally. “Is it.”

“No.”

“How.” It still wasn’t a question. 

“Just do.”

“Like Dr. Manhattan. Will it to happen.”

“Told you first night,” Jack sighed. “Prison is the best place.”

“Best place for what?”

Jack tilted his head and peered at him through the new curtain of hair. 

“I’ll tell you. S’nice to talk to somebody who isn’t afraid.” His voice dropped to an inviting whisper. “The fear is the thing. Everyone in here is afraid of something. Except you. Hard to find a soul who doesn’t live for itself. You aren’t afraid at all. Are you? Even in the dream, you never flinched.”

“Feed on fear. Monster.”

“Everything feeds on something.”

“What happened in Fenwick?”

“Sedated me. Without conscious control, I fed on everything. The infirmary staff died outright, and then the other patients, and then the other wards. I was full then, and behaved better. But the asylum head tried to kill me in my sleep and I fought back before I could think clearly. Sent em all insane. When the police showed up, all the patients were dead and the surviving staff were cannibals or talking to giant spiders or trying to swim up walls that weren’t there. The drugs wore off, so I was the only one talking sense at that point.” Jack chuckled again. “What will a lobotomy do to me, I wonder? I will have to eat, brain-broke or not, and I won’t wake up from that. Maybe I’ll feed until they do manage to kill me. Heh.” He tucked some hair behind his ear, a weirdly human gesture. “Courts wanted to let me go after some observations, but when I told the jury about what I had tasted when I ate everyone up, they decided I wasn’t fit to be loose.”

“Which is the way you wanted it.” Rorschach hadn’t moved. “Rather eat criminals than innocents.”

“You give me credit I don‘t deserve,” Jack said. His disturbingly gentle smile was back. “I like the bars. I like the locks. They call it, what? A captive audience? I have no need to go anywhere. Prison doesn‘t keep me in. It keeps them from getting away from me.”


	5. Chapter 5

Jack was removed before long. Rorschach heard his footsteps on the metal floor, but they never seemed to fade out. They kept reverberating long after he had gone,and settled into the same pounding heartbeat that had been in the dream. It was impossible to sleep with it vibrating through the prison. It hid itself in the rhythm of their own heartbeats and blinks, in the rush of blood in their ears. From his cell, Rorschach could see the other inmate’s pacing like tigers, restless and unnerved as the pounding went on. It wasn’t coming from any of them. 

No sleep meant no dream, but Rorschach found himself imagining Jack down in a tiny cell, maybe straitjacketed, arms pulled across his chest like a vampire in a coffin. Maybe it was _his_ heartbeat they heard as his influence crept through all the halls. His hair could be growing, snaking though the bars and all the tiny places, seeking out fearful souls like black, hungry tentacles. The bars wouldn’t keep him out. The pounding never relented. Rorschach’s eye twitched in time with it awhile, and then it was morning and he was being taken to see the psychologist. 

It was uneventful. The doctor didn’t seem to be vibrating with the rest of the prison. Rorschach wondered how long that would last. Cannibals and giant spiders. Sent em all insane, Jack had said. How many more nights of no sleep would it take? Maybe there was something subliminal in it, brought out the worst in people, not that they needed the help, brought it to the surface, made it well up and overflow out of them like storm drains. It was definitely bringing up some of his unhappier memories. 

He ended up telling the doctor about the dress. The image of Kitty had been flickering around his mind anyway. It was easy to imagine her laying there on the main floor, a circle of inmates watching what happened to her. He hadn’t actually seen the crime, for all that it was burned into him. He hadn’t been one of the useless witnesses. Had he? He hoped it was burned into them too. That they saw it everywhere, in shadows and patterns and in the shapeless darkness when they tried to sleep. He hoped they were never free of it. They had chosen to stand and watch, let them watch forever. 

So, he told the doctor about it. He wasn’t tired enough to be giving in, not that he would. Dr. Long reminded him of a drowning hamster, round, big-toothed,and sporting a floundering expression. Nothing he had to say would change anything. There would be no lights shed here. The bulbs had been broken long ago, and the sockets hung empty, but that didn’t mean Rorschach couldn’t see clearly. Long wasn’t going to reach him, but he could reach back. 

It didn’t matter. The pounding was relentless. It throbbed behind eyes and in temples. Teeth were on edge and tempers were short. The Sing Sing inmates weren’t known for emotional stability anyway, and in all honesty, neither was Rorschach. He could feel it bubbling under his neighbors’ skins, like teapots that whistled profanities. He had more control than they did. He reined it in, bottled it up, buried it under his apathetic mask until the lunch line.

It wasn’t until he had been dragged away again, smell of cooking flesh still in his nose, that he noticed the pounding had sped up. Why? Fear again? Had he helped Jack by spreading more fear through the prison population? What was there really to be afraid of here? Jack? No. Jack, himself, was much less frightening than Dr. Manhattan. He was just another predator in this place. No. The thing to be afraid of here was Rorschach. 

Another night went by, slowly ticked off by the pounding. It could be the ticking of a gigantic clock, every second echoing through their minds. Rorschach considered trying to sleep just to get away from the noise for awhile. He was tired enough to sleep, but didn’t. 

Morning came again. The guards came again. Dr. Long had come again. This time Rorschach told more than he intended to. The pounding had knocked on his mental doors all night and it was easier just to open them and tell the bloated gopher what he imagined he wanted to know. The startled expression he left on the doctor’s face could very well mean that a few of the doctor’s doors had been kicked in. That at least was something Rorschach was good at.


	6. Chapter 6

Dr. Long didn't come again. A day passed, minutes ticking by like the pounding they could all feel. It vibrated in their teeth. The threats and insults from the other inmates intensified with it. Rorschach processed them as numbly as he was able. They were afraid, partially of him, and partly of the brewing storm that their animal brains could feel building all around them. They pretended it was because the man who had tried to stab Rorschach in the lunch line was dying, but it was unlikely that they cared anything about him. 

Nobody slept that night. The next day, there was a handful of candy corn with his meal. 

"Happy Halloween," the server said without any enthusiasm at all. Halloween. The perfect time for a fear-eater to awaken and return to walk the earth. Rorschach made sure that the other inmates had been given candy too before he ate his. The pressure was still building, he could feel it in his ears. He would need the extra energy later. 

When the burned man died, they all felt it. Something popped, like a dislocated joint shoved back into socket, freeing them to lash out. The prison erupted. The violence and the fury were only an inch or two deep. Underneath it roiled mindless, panicked terror. They had to fight to get away from it, to kill anyone in their way to get way from it, to save themselves or just remove the threat by any means. 

Rorschach sat in his cell and waited. He didn't have to try to escape. Something would be coming to 'get' him, and to do that, it would have to open the doors. He was almost amused when it turned out to be Big Figure. It was almost impossible to be afraid of that. This, he knew how to handle. 

He was willing to admit that Big Figure was handling the fear well, using it to his advantage instead of scrambling from it. And his sway over the two slabs with him was enough to keep them focused as well. They were near the edge though. It only took a few jibes to drive the weaker of the two to lunge for him and then he had the man's arms and he felt the fear spike to the surface again. 

It only intensified when they cut his throat, and then when Rorschach killed the second one, Big Figure's control broke and he fled. It was easy for Rorschach to follow. As satisfying as Big Figure's personal terror of him was, some practical part of Rorschach's mind wanted to extinguish it before it could strengthen Jack. 

He tracked Big Figure to the lavatories and there, a jolt of surprise that actually dispelled his own aura of fear, his old partner, back in costume. Juspeczyk was there too, which registered another emotion entirely, but he didn't have time. Not with Big Figure's terror clamoring in his head. He excused himself and went to take care of it.

 

Later, as they took off, Rorschach looked back at the prison. It seemed engulfed in shadow, as if a dark octopus was slowly pulling it under. In flight, the pounding faded away, letting him concentrate on the mission and enjoy being on task with a partner again. The task ahead of them was daunting, and while Rorschach felt grim about their chances, he wasn't afraid. 

It wasn't until they were in Karnak that the heartbeat became audible again, drowning out even his own furious pulse. It made sense. Fear. Jack fed on fear and all the war hysteria had slowly been building up in him. No wonder the Angola Penitentiary hadn't been able to contain him. And now Veidt had brought a whole terrified way of life to the surface. It had to be filling Jack to bursting. 

Rorschach doubted that the catastrophe would be enough to destroy Jack. He would grow fat on the massacre and his shadow would spread beyond the prison. There would be nowhere on the earth that wasn't afraid after this and nowhere Jack couldn't reach. 

Full of such thoughts, he missed the whole exchange between Veidt and Dan. He jolted when Dan took his arm, but let himself be pulled away. Rorschach rode home in numb silence. Silk Spectre tried to provoke him into responding to her chatter, but he didn't move until the were over the New York skyline. 

It was a mass of madness, destruction, and blood. Dan was green under his cowl. Laurie was in tears, whimpering over how the victims must've died. Rorschach ignored her. She was only stating the obvious. He could see the black arms reaching out, hear the pulse again. He could see Dan wincing in time with it, feel the throb in his own temples. 

"You feel it?" he asked.

"Yeah," Dan said. It took him a moment to realize the intensity of the question.

"Not over," Rorschach said when he was sure Dan was paying attention. "May never end."

"Nothing ends," Laurie said from behind her hands. 

'What are you looking at?" Dan asked. Rorschach pointed. Out of the desolation, a black figure was walking. It wasn't just Jack's hair anymore. He was wreathed in black.

"Oh!" Laurie's voice was relieved. "See? There's always survivors. We'll survive this. Make it right somehow." 

Dan was studying Rorschach too intently to answer. He knew something was up, could feel the apprehension building. Rorschach was trying to keep the dread from welling up, to deny Jack at least that much. Jack kept walking toward ground zero and the worst of the mayhem. It was too far to see, but Rorschach could feel him laughing.


End file.
